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Debunk the Link Authority Algorithm and Send Search Engines Back to the Drawing Board

Face it, paid links are not going to go away. Why can't we pay someone to link to our sites? I can pay them to blog about my site or pay for an image ad. Even Google buys links

What is the difference between a story link, a text link or a banner image link? How is that any different than a quarter page ad in a magazine or the newspaper classified or a 30 second spot on a TV show? Is the magazine and newspaper not advocating the product in their ad the same way a web site suggests a sponsor? Google even holds a double standard as they pay for links on MSN, Yahoo and many other sites. Just check the top of the page in the blue or grey box marked "Sponsored Links".

It will have to become an unwritten rule (not published on your site) that any web site is willing to link to another and all you will have to do is contact them and ask. Everyone has a price. If a competitor is asked for a link and the price was right would you give it to them? I get offers for domains I own and if the price is right I sell them. I would let go a link before a domain any day.

Google does not like paid links because their algorithm now places such a high emphasis on links as a quality indicator, and paid linking subverts their system's integrity. Is Google performing a service to the internet community by cracking down on paid links and thwarting Internet spammers? Or are they making a big mistake using links as a top measure for authority? Does Google practice what they preach? Notice how the right half/third of the search result page is called "Sponsored Links". Those are all Google Adwords customers paying for links to their sites. Heck, Google will even pay you to put paid links on your web site using Google Adsense.

Do you want to sabotage your competitor? You can sign in to Google's webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word "paidlink" (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. Or use the unauthenticated spam report form and include the word "paidlink" (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

So here we are trying very hard to be the best we can be, optimize our sites for keywords related to our products and services and being penalized for advertising them. The very authority handing down punishment is guilty of the same crime and makes 99% of its billions in revenues with "Sponsored Links".

Ok, let’s take money out of the equation. All web sites stop accepting money for the links. Everyone would still work with respective web sites to obtain the links because it is the method for improving rankings. The same linking would exist only no one would have gotten paid for it, including Google. Problem is, Google would no longer exist as we know it and its “Web God” status removed. We would likely then, not be so concerned with linking and use other search engines like MSN who do not hold such a high authority on linking. "MSN isn't exactly following Google in this regard. They obviously aren't going to recommend anyone use cloaking and paid links, but they don't discount either practice as forbidden." Mike McDonald - Web Pro News. One of my favorite articles on the paid link topic is How to Profit from Google's War on Paid Links and A pragmatic defense against Google's anti paid links campaign.

Maybe this whole paid linking algorithm is a temporary solution to a bigger problem. What if Google could not keep up with spammers and this was just a quick way for them to fix their search results to buy more time to come up with a better, more legitimate method for assigning authority. Certainly Google does not want the public to learn they are hypocritical when it comes to paid links. Or maybe they are just upset others are stealing their own business model.

When I look at the right hand side of my search results I consider that spam. Rarely are those links even helpful, maybe one out of 100 is what I am looking for. I do a lot of searches each day. I have almost trained myself not to even look at sponsored links much like we all did with banner advertising. Eventually the majority will do the same and Google has noticed this as a trend as they have started moving the sponsored advertising into the natural search results. Hence the blue and yellow box just above all natural search results.

How is this any different than Yahoo selling paid links within the natural search results? Didn't know you could pay to have your site ranked in Yahoo? Contact me at 720-982-7770 and I will get it all setup for you. Google claims to be the all mighty figure in the world of search. They also claim not to tamper with the natural search results but, they do.

The following is a question posed to Matt Cutts regarding what is considered a "paid link" to Google...

Q: That paid link example was helpful. Can you give me another example?

A: Sure. This one also has "paid advertising" as an image, but our existing algorithms still discount these links:

If you follow the link you will find an image example of a site that uses sponsored links much in the same way Google does. If I were Matt Cutts I would penalize my own company (Google) for being a spammy paid link site.

What are we to glean from this extremely political and controversial topic?

• Google practices paid linking. It is their whole business model.
• Google does not discredit all paid links. They look specifically for sites that "look" spammy.
• Use common sense when buying links and try to get links from trusted sites and names that are well known.
• Get as many non-paid links as possible before opening your wallet.
• Try not to overpay for links, make sure there is value.
• Do not focus so much on linking but making the content on your website something others will want to link to for Free.

If you have any questions regarding a paid link, feel free to contact me and I will review with you any benefits or potential problems. If you haven't started blogging yet you are missing out on yet another non-paid link to your web site. Download Free Blog Software.

Posted by R. Stacy Cook at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What is a conversion? What is my cost per conversion? Are you confusing Cost per Action (CPA) with Cost per Acquisition? When evaluating your return on investment it is important to know what a conversion is to you and ultimately how that should affect increases and decreases in your marketing budget.

A conversion is simply when a user takes a desired action within your web site. You can further analyze conversions through funnels or simply a series of desired actions. It is important to know what your funnels are so you can monitor which ones are working, which ones are not and why. This way you can make modifications to improve conversions within a particular funnel.

You must first determine what a conversion is to you. Is a conversion a sale, a lead, or both? If both, then you would have a separate cost allowance for each action. If you offer multiple products or services at varying levels of price your cost per conversion should vary by individual product or service price level.

Finding the cost per conversion can be tough to figure out and can be very complicated. Depending on how your business is organized, you may or may not be able to come up with an exact figure. If you are unable to come up with an exact figure you can at least come up with a rough number or a range. This is better than not knowing at all and applying increased budgets to the wrong campaigns.

It is also important to understand the stages of your users. Customers who are in research phases are still valuable to you as they are gathering information in order to compare and make a decision to buy. However, you would assign a lower cost per action in acquiring them as they would not be likely to spend money in the short term and chances of a sale are lower. Also, pay attention to what actions these types of users take over the ones who actually purchase. This will help you create user specific funnels.

Measuring the performance of your campaign can be gauged in many ways. Overall you can get a quick glimpse based on traffic, which most web site owners are familiar with. This generic statistic by no means is the only method for determining success. Did you know you can see what web sites send you the most traffic? It is typically called Top Referrers. You can even see the top search engine keywords used to find your web pages. This data can be used to help you understand what your users are looking for and how to shape your site to encourage more traffic and increase conversions.

Be sure you are not comparing apples to oranges by determining what a conversion is to you. Break products and services into categories based on price points. Associate various funnels or actions with the types of users who use them. Use analytics to help determine if you are focusing on the right campaigns. You have to come up with your own cost per conversion before you can measure your campaign success.

Posted by R. Stacy Cook at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tips for Preparing Your Site for the New Year

As 2007 comes to a close, most businesses have spent time planning ahead: new products, new markets, and acquiring new customers. Those who have not had the time for formal planning have thought about the kind of growth they want to in 2008. Whether your planning is formal or informal, there is a critical question all businesses expecting growth in 2008 should ask themselves: Is our web site ready?

Web sites have become one of the leading engines behind business development. Your web site is the window into your company through which your audience sees you. It is the way most economic way to acquire new customers, drive sales, build credibility, get out your message, and enhance customer retention and loyalty. Your organization's web site should be an essential part of your plans for 2008.

How Can You Get Your Site Ready for 2008

The top web sites have the following in common:

• Have many methods for converting visitors.
• Simple navigation and simple language.
• Unique and interesting content.
• Contain fresh and innovative components.
• Encourage users to bookmark and return.

Converting Visitors
The most important thing your web site can do for you is convert prospects into sales. But is your web site built to do that? Strong web sites have success funnels, resources, registrations, and conversion tools all over them to make sure they are giving their visitors plenty of opportunities to give their information, purchase a product, request more information, or sign up for a newsletter. Focusing on site conversions means increased sales and maximized return on investment for each marketing and advertising dollar spent. Good site conversion strategies take time and planning to make sure the user gets exactly what they want from search to submit.

Navigation and Language
Understanding what users want from your site, and designing the site to get them where they want to go can be a complex task, and User Experience planning is critical to the success of your web site. You can have the best product or service on the market, but if a customer can't get the information they are looking for when they're looking for it, they will click the back button. Using simple language and short sentences can encourage longer user sessions. Building your site around helping users to navigate and easily understand what you're offering and how they can be an important step towards online success.

Unique Content
Statistics show that users spend about 3 seconds deciding whether they want to stay on a site or move on. Is your content compelling enough to catch a user's attention in just 3 seconds? Building the right content and message, and displaying it in a way that is going to interest your visitors is a very difficult. If your web site content is not regularly updated, periodically overhauled, and constantly measured against the competition you are loosing potential leads to your competition.

Innovative Components
Most organizations think their site has to look just like all the other sites in their industry. They add the tools they see others have, they use content everyone else has, even choose colors and designs of related web sites. There's more to your customer than this! Innovation and creativity across the web are producing powerful sites with high conversion rates. Your site can have the same results if you broaden your thinking to draw inspiration from a wide variety of sources. Video, blogs, Flash, landing pages, dynamic content, targeted messaging, RSS feeds, articles, whitepapers, affiliate tools, cross linking - these are all examples of business building tools. Consider a creative facelift to your site that goes beyond your competitor.

Repeat Visitors
Aside from a converted sale, one of the most important metrics in measuring web site success is the number of repeat visits. Well designed, finely crafted, and simple messaged sites all find ways to keep their visitors coming back. Incentives, resources, news, updates, newsletters all keep the visitor interested and wanting more. What does your web site do to promote repeat visits?

Many Edit-X customers have contacted us already and asked what they can do to improve things and get their sites updated. Most thinking some costly work but you will be amazed how adding a simple form, revising the homepage, changing a few graphics, writing a couple article, optimizing a few pages are all great and simple ways to get started preparing for 2008.

Posted by R. Stacy Cook at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Debate? Who wants to debate? I have work to do. Web designers and developers all have plenty of work and at the end of the day if progress is not made then you haven't accomplished anything or, do you have something you can be proud of?

This is all coming to you from having only slept four hours after a 24 hour work day, 14 hours of which were spent dealing with cross browser compatibility and the complexities of CSS.

This is not a new issue for me as I personally have been battling it for years. Until now ignoring CSS has worked for me as I felt it not mature enough for prime time or a worth the investment of my time. Now, with the introduction of "Web 2.0" the need for standards compliance is now on the fore front of web site development and CSS can no longer be ignored.

To this day I hand code all of my HTML and instead of writing <table> I find that <div> can be just as handy. Warning: CSS can also be a complete waste of time and a loss of your 14 hour sprint to get ahead. Can't XHTML and CSS get along?

Edit-X is currently rebooting our corporate web site and a portion of this project is moving from XHTML to CSS. I can not even begin to explain what a struggle this has been, although I am sure plenty of you have similar stories to share.

We have always had browser compatibility issues but not quite like this before. There is nothing like spending 2 hours on something seemingly small only to load another browser and find that none of your efforts were worthwhile and you’re not done until its cross platform compatible. Another two hours later you have something you can be proud of. Reloading never felt so good.

So is this what we are left with? We get a nifty looking site that we can be proud of? I don't know about you but I prefer profitably to being proud any day. I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the amount of time it takes to build a CSS compliant site versus a perfectly equal XHTML site which both looks the same, acts the same and indexes keywords the same. I hear others claim that file size is an issue. Give me a break, none of my customers care about dial up users. Ok, ok so the code is cleaner when you view source. I only ask you which source? Take a look at that CSS file. You have only moved the amount of code to another, hidden, location.

It’s the same looking at someone else’s tables from 12 months ago as looking at someone’s CSS from one month ago. Editing others code is always a problem. Neither CSS nor XHTML can fix that, only good commenting. Speaking of commenting how about that <!-- IE HACK --> throughout your CSS or <-- Opera FIX -->. They call it a hack because it is a hack and hacks are not a standard.

I am not here to bash CSS as it has been very valuable for us all of these years in doing what it was initially designed to do, a single location to make global site adjustments. But now using it to define every single pixel location of every object and the overall structure of the whole site? Have we gone too far? Created too many options? There are so many options that the browsers can't agree on thousands of parameters versus of a few hundred indifferences in years past.

Designers and Developers need to understand that it is not the need of the designer to communicate the artistic vision or the developer to have access to the object or code more efficiently as the issue. The problem is not the need to have full control or only getting a roughly similar display between browsers. CSS is a great concept and its development and growth are certainly necessary. The browsers interpretation of the options is what ruins everything and always has. See, Browser War. I will save this topic for another blog entry.

We have to magically take one piece of code, prepare it for two completely separate interpreters (browsers) with multiple versions and have them all display it the same to the end user. That’s like taking an Adobe Creative Suite 3 PSD and trying to open it in Photoshop 7.0, Photoshop 6.0 some other comparable photo editor maybe Photo Impact and its various versions and viewing your design file in tact. All of this while being compliant with standards and delivering the project on time and on budget, which is impossible, no doubt.

How many times have you bid a site revision at one hour thinking it could be done in CSS quickly and it took you three? Did you ask the customer to compensate you for your additional time? How often does this happen? Start keeping track, you will be surprised.

Let’s say you’re my customer and you want a bid for a new five page static site for SEO link building. I ask you if you want XHTML or CSS compliant code. You say, what's the difference? I tell you that CSS is double the time and that means double the cost. Which do you choose? Of course that depends on the purpose of your project but for most, they will take the cheaper option. Why shouldn't they?

This isn't about old school or new school, right or wrong, designers versus developers or CSS versus XHTML. It is about the differences in web browsers and knowing when to use XHTML within your CSS. If you can get something done quicker using a <table>, DO IT, DO IT. Sure beats float left and float right for a three column layout.

I will leave you with the fact that CSS and XHTML are here to stay and CSS is no doubt the future and provides more control than XHTML. CSS also has a long way to go and the number browser compatibility issues are on the rise. Use your head and save yourself some time and frustration. XHTML is more stable and has seniority in web development. At the end of the day you must accomplish something to show progress and deliver your projects on time and on budget. Do you want to build web sites to be proud of them or make a profit?

Here are the links I used in my research...

• http://blogs.vertigo.com/personal/willa/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=5

• http://www.decloak.com/Dev/CSSTables/CSS_Tables_01.aspx

• http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/throwing_tables/

• http://www.imarc.net/communique/view/76/div_vs_table_battle_2k6

• http://csscreator.com/node/7509

• http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum83/9319.htm

• http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=49097

• http://blogs.vertigo.com/personal/willa/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=5

• http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=224227

• http://www.sitepoint.com/article/tables-vs-css

• http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=171791&highlight=css+versus+tables

Keywords: div vs table, div versus table, css vs xhtml, css versus xhtml

Posted by R. Stacy Cook at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

NYU’s Jeff Han has proven himself to be the master of multi-touch displays. This latest video shows some amazing interface work that reminds me of the recently posted Bud Select spot from MTh. Maybe I’m weird, but I find this work inspiring. The fluidity of movement is something we as motion graphics animators are constantly striving for, isn’t it? I’d love to be able to effortlessly toss graphics around like that.

Posted by R. Stacy Cook at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The 3D desktop prototype for Windows, called BumpTop, does some must-see-to-believe wrangling of digital documents as if they were physical pieces of paper. Words don't do this justice; just hit that play button.

Posted by R. Stacy Cook at 07:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Posted by R. Stacy Cook at 08:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)